In my other guise as a TV presenter, I've done my fair share of "pieces to camera", where you gawp down the lens and pretend to be talking directly to the viewer at home, even though you don't know who they are and don't really care whether they live or die just so long as they don't switch off. Most of the time, I get to do them indoors - either video diary-style alone in my flat, or in a cheap studio with no one but the crew around - which suits me just fine. Doing it out in the street is a nightmare. Aside from all the traffic noise, you have to contend with goonish members of the public shouting "wanker", or standing in the background miming masturbation, both of which are my job.

Whenever I pass by Westminster and see the political correspondents standing on that verge opposite the House of Commons, preparing to go live, I wince on their behalf. Anything could happen. A duck could fly into your face. Someone could lob a bag of flour over you. I don't know how they stand it.

Still, if that's difficult, it's not a patch on what Grant Mitchell gets up to in Ross Kemp: Return To Afghanistan (Sun, 10pm, Sky1), which finds the former EastEnder and alleged domestic violence victim having to record pieces to camera while lying in a ditch with live ammunition flying over his head, so close you can hear it zing past the mic. You might expect a documentary fronted by Kemp to consist of macho grandstanding and sequences in which he tries to stare the Taliban to death. Instead he spends most of his time blurting obscenities and quaking with terror; it's shit-scary and far from glamorous.

The politics of the situation aside - which the programme doesn't even try to address - Kemp and his crew have displayed an insane level of bravery to garner this footage, especially when you consider it's shot in HD (HD cameras are far heavier than standard ones, which means heavier equipment and more of it: no fun when you're dragging it through a chaotic war zone). Within 30 minutes of going on patrol, they're pinned down by RPG fire and forced to take cover; most of these segments play out with very few edits, which makes for a remarkably authentic and immersive experience.

And that's part of the problem: although Kemp clearly believes in what he's doing, enough to risk his life, it's hard to shake the suspicion that the whole thing amounts to what Johnny Rotten once called a cheap holiday in other people's misery. Enemy fighters are generally killed, or "suppressed", off-screen, and while the programme makes admirable attempts to cover the human misery of British families back home whose sons are killed in action, it's the battlefield sequences you tune in for. And as a viewer, you naturally urge them to get more intense, more dangerous, as you watch from the comfort of your sofa. In a way it's the war zone equivalent of a Steve Irwin wildlife doc: the sheer perilous spectacle threatens to override any deep thought process. Nonetheless, Kemp deserves credit for putting himself through it.

Sticking with vérité depictions of war, Generation Kill (Sun, 10pm, FX) is shaping up to be a weekly combination of excitement and fury: an unvarnished portrait of US marines in the early days of the Iraq war scripted by Ed Burns and David Simon, fearsomely intelligent creators of The Wire. Unvarnished because not only do they spend more time sitting in their Humvees griping about supplies than engaging the enemy, but because they're not painted as heroes, but rather foul-mouthed and authentic human beings in a super-male environment. Episode One saw them opening letters from schoolkids and joking about which ones they'd like to fuck: The Green Berets it ain't. A friend of mine can't watch it because she finds them repugnant, but I've developed a begrudging respect for the unrelenting gallows humour. Anyway, as befits a show sharing a bloodline to The Wire, it's slow-paced, talky, full of alienating jargon, and quite, quite brilliant.